The 16th Annual Conference of the International Society for Historical and Systematic Research on Textbooks and Educational Media e.V. (IGSBi) was held in co-operation with the Research and Documentation Center for South Tyrolean History of Education at the Faculty for Education of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, from October 5 to 7, 2018, on the campus in Brixen-Bressanone.

Scientists from eleven European countries dealt with the topic “Europe and Educational Media.”

The first thematic block comprised historical contributions. Among the issues were the pan-European textbooks of Johan Amos Comenius, the depiction of Europe in Russian primers in the 19th and the early 20th centuries, and “Euro-VISIONS” in German school wall charts from one hundred years.

A further contribution dealt with the presentation of European places of remembrance in German textbooks and lead over from the historical aspects to topical themes.

The second thematic block considered language diversity in Europe and the corresponding challenges for educational media; it was, e.g., about multilingualism in Switzerland and in Poland.

The third thematic block dealt with the depiction of Europe in educational media for various subjects. Questions were discussed like the depiction of Europe in Turkish History textbooks and in Polish textbooks, or identity constructions educational media from border regions, e.g., between Germany and Denmark.

A further thematic block comprised contributions with regard to the presentation of Europe in new educational media. It was, among others, about the decoding of visual orders of perception in digitally available educational films, and about the efforts of the European Union to explain Europe multi-modally to children.

A panel with five presentations, which was organized by the Georg Eckert Institute – Leibniz Institute for International Textbook Research, focused on bi- and multi-national textbook activities, for example the German-Polish History textbook project, and efforts to find a multi-perspective view of the common history in educational media in South-Eastern Europe.

During the conference, a workshop organized by the Reading Primers Special Interest Group dealt with catechism primers in Europe; here questions like multi-nationality and multilingualism played an important role as well.

With regard to a reawakened public and scientific interest in religion, this volume deals in various disciplinary approaches (educationalists, religious scholars, experts from different subject didactics, textbook authors, teachers) with the question, which influence religion(s) take(s) on educational media, how their depiction has changed relating to content, and how educational media for modern religious instruction can look like today.

The historical contributions of this volume illustrate the tremendous changes over the centuries: While teaching religion and education were nearly equated up to the early modern period, and educational media hence comprised religious content, it seems to have disappeared meanwhile – in parts entirely – from the curricula of the European countries and subsequently from the educational media.

The topical contributions of the volume from different subject-related didactics address the possibilities of a well-balanced, multi-perspective depiction of religious content.

The contributions from religious education discuss the challenges to educational media for religious instruction, both to impart fundamental knowledge about one’s own religion and to initiate a dialogue in a growingly secular and at the same time interreligious society.

If one wants to learn what was regarded as “good” teaching in a specific country at a particular time, one should best take a look at the textbooks, which were used for the education of future teachers. Then und today the knowledge of different disciplines converges in these textbooks and comes upon the peculiar interests of the political rulers. Moreover, due to their intended purpose, they act exactly at the interface between methodical-didactic theory and concrete instruction. Therefore, it is of special interest to History of Education to analyze these books. The present study examines what was conveyed in approved textbooks for “Specific Instruction” to future elementary teachers at selected Bavarian colleges for teacher education about the correct instruction in Elementary History during the German Empire (1871–1918). A focus of the analysis lies on the years from the foundation of the German Reich [Empire] until 1885; but an outlook also examines the further development of the discussion of teaching methods until the end of the First World War.

The presentation of the world has been a fundamental role of teaching since the beginnings of schooling. Teaching got a medial basis through the dissemination of school wall charts as visualizing medium. This analysis of the classroom pictures for visual instruction and their accompanying texts in the times of the German Empire deals with the image-specific content knowledge and with the formal structures and strategies of teaching by means of classroom pictures. Using a multilevel qualitative-interpretative analysis, the author shows dominant patterns both with regard to the textual and the visual level, which shaped the mediatized teaching contents for the duration of the investigation period.

The growing heterogeneity of students is a serious challenge for differentiated teaching. Educational media, being a central and steering teaching medium, can support teachers and students in doing so; especially in digital form, they allow for a consideration of individual learning levels by different forms of adaptivity. In the examination, which is presented in this book, the author, using various e-textbook models, analyzed empirically teachers’ and students’ preferences with regard to the adaptation possibilities for inner differentiation of teaching. The author, a specialist for digital media himself, sees in this new medium an explicit potential for ways of teaching, which better meet individual differences.

Mobile Learning and its subdomain Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) are new fields of research in the 21st century. Since 2010, the use of tablets at schools has gained more and more in importance all over the world. The new digital reality of contemporary classroom instruction, which is gradually emerging, has so far been little studied with regard to schools and foreign language learning. The first part of the book discusses the current state of research, the characteristics of mobile learning tools, implementation models, and learning-theoretical foundations and framework models. The second part presents the results of the study “Learning English in Tablet Classes at Bavarian Schools.” 17 classes and their subject teachers participated in this Germany-wide first survey of all tablet classes in a Federal State. The study describes not only the reality of instruction in the surveyed tablet classes, but it also provides differentiated answers to the question as to the added didactical value of tablet-based learning scenarios both for competence-oriented English instruction and for the students’ individual mobile (foreign language) learning.

This volume introduces the Augsburg Analysis and Evaluation Matrix for Analog and Digital Educational Media (AAER) for the first time in an elementarized version to the public. In this form it can be widely used for teacher education, for quality control, and by teachers themselves.

With regard to the Augsburg project in the context of the Quality Campaign for Teacher Education, the book shows interdisciplinary and subject-related applications of the AAER, using the examples of analog and digital educational media. The AAER will contribute towards implementing a criteria-based handling of educational media as part of a future standard training of prospective teachers.